Carnegie Mellon University

Tepper Inclusive Growth and Prosperity Initiative

The Tepper School is a major center of research on how economic growth disparately affects individuals, businesses, and communities, and on how policy can be designed to better ensure that the benefits of growth are widely enjoyed.

The dynamic economic environment of the 21st century has brought far-reaching benefits to society, but it has also raised questions about who bears the costs, and who shares in the opportunities associated with a rapidly changing economy.

The initiative for Inclusive Growth and Prosperity was created to promote the innovative work being done by Tepper School faculty, and to better facilitate dialogue with students, researchers, and the broader public.

 Areas of Research

  • How changes in the workplace, business, and trade environments impact labor earnings and wage inequality.

  • How geographic, educational, and other barriers impede access to new jobs and new markets.

  • How tax and social policy can respond to today’s challenges while preserving growth.

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A Closer Look at the Impacts of Policy on Immigrants' Economic Outcomes

In her exploration of issues around immigration, Rebecca Lessem, Associate Professor of Economics, seeks to understand the impacts of policy on individuals’ decisions and outcomes.

Read About the Research

Carnegie-Rochester-NYU Conference on Public Policy

2021 Conference on Economic Access and Mobility

Removing impediments to economic mobility and ensuring fair access to economic opportunities is a central concern for citizens and policymakers.

This conference seeks proposals that analyze the causes, consequences, and policy implications of barriers to mobility across the income and wealth distribution.

more about the 2021 conference

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Tax Cuts for the Super Rich?

Christopher Sleet, Professor of Economics, and Laurence Ales, Associate Professor of Economics, discuss their research in an interview with the American Economic Association that examines the upside of letting top-earning CEOs keep more of their pay.

Read Interview

Education & Student Opportunities

Students engage with concepts through courses, projects, and competitions.

Website offering resources and opportunities to Tepper School undergraduates interested in conducting economic research, and showcasing the past work done by Tepper students.

UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH WEBSITE

A hackathon-style competition in which undergraduate students are presented with a pressing social problem and challenged to combine data and economic reasoning to arrive at a policy recommendation.

GLOBAL INITIATIVES COMPETITION

Why do some emerging markets grow more quickly than others? What institutions and policies appear to foster economic progress? In this undergraduate course, students combine theory and data to draw lessons from recent historical experience and gain a better understanding of what drives growth. 

Instructor: Laurence Ales

This class examines how technology is reshaping the labor market, affecting the jobs available to workers and the wages they earn. Students will use empirical methods to study these changes in this undergraduate course and form conclusions about whether workplace automation is likely to help workers or harm them. 

This undergraduate course offers an introduction to the study of macroeconomics. Students will consider the problem of measuring economic well-being, the challenge of designing successful economic policy, and topical issues like wage inequality and the macroeconomic effects of technological change. 

Instructors: Chris Sleet, Ariel Zetlin-Jones

Students taking this undergraduate course will learn about the theoretical and empirical tools economists use to understand economic performance, and how to employ these tools in the task of designing and improving macroeconomic policy. 

Instructors: Shu Lin Wee, Ali Shourideh

In this MBA course, students will consider the effects of trade and international capital flows on growth and the problem of designing national fiscal and monetary policy in an increasingly global market. 

Instructor: Laurence Ales